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Hindi (Devanagari: हिन्दी or हिंदी; IPA: [hɪnd̪iː]), an Indo-European language spoken mainly in northern and central India, is one of the official languages of the Union government of India.[1][2] It is part of a dialect continuum of the Indic family, bounded on the northwest and west by Punjabi, Sindhi, Urdu, and Gujarati; on the south by Marathi and Konkani; on the southeast by Oriya; on the east by Bengali; and on the north by Nepali. Hindi also refers to a standardized register of Hindustani termed khariboli, that emerged as the standard dialect. The grammatical description in this article concerns this standard Hindi.
ClassificationHindi is classified as a language belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. It comes under the Indo-Aryan division of the Indo-Iranian branch of this family of languages. Etymology
DemographicsAreaImage:Hindi Mahastotra.jpg Stotra text in Devanagari script Local variations of Hindi are counted as minority languages in several countries, including Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Suriname, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK among various other countries around the world. Number of speakersHindi is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, due to the large population of India. According to the 1991 census of India[3] (which encompasses all the dialects of Hindi, including those that might be considered separate languages by some linguists—e.g., Bhojpuri), Hindi is the mother tongue of about 337 million Indians, or about 40% of India's population that year. According to SIL International's Ethnologue,[4] about 180 million people in India regard standard (Khari Boli) Hindi as their mother tongue, and another 300 million use it as a second language. Outside India, Hindi speakers number around 8 million in Nepal, 890,000 in South Africa, 685,000 in Mauritius, 317,000 in the U.S.,[5] 233,000 in Yemen, 147,000 in Uganda, 30,000 in Germany, 20,000 in New Zealand and 5,000 in Singapore, while the UK and UAE also have notable populations of Hindi speakers. Hence, according to the SIL ethnologue (1999 data), Hindi/Urdu is the fifth most spoken language in the world. According to Comrie (1998 data),[6] Hindi is the second most spoken language in the world, with 333 million native speakers. Because of Hindi's extreme similarity to Urdu, speakers of the two languages can usually understand one another, if both sides refrain from using specialized vocabulary. Indeed, linguists sometimes count them as being part of the same language diasystem. However, Hindi and Urdu are socio-politically different, and people who self-describe as being speakers of Urdu would question their being counted as native speakers of Hindi, and vice-versa. Official and social statusOfficial status
At the state level, Hindi is the official language of the following states: Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, and Delhi. Each of these states may also designate a "co-official language"; in Uttar Pradesh for instance, depending on the political formation in power, sometimes this language is Urdu. Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of co-official language in several states. Social statusWhile the Union government has sedulously promoted the spread of Hindi, its official status is not reflected in social importance. As with other south Asian language groups, even native speakers of Hindi, if elite, are usually fluent in English. Education in English is a prerequisite for social status—hence the existence of several English medium "public" (actually private) and Christian missionary schools in India. English remains the sole language of higher education in many of the fields of learning such as Engineering, Medicine and Science. There were numerous pro-Hindi agitations in the so-called Hindi belt as a reaction to the anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu during the 1960s, but the movement de facto called for an expurgation of English (being a foreign language, sic) rather than actual promotion of Hindi. Since the elite can use English, Hindi has been particularly weak on the Internet. As a barometer, the Devanagari fonts and keyboards used on computers today were not standardized within India - earlier government standards such as the 8-bit ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange) or the GIST keyboard were never widely adopted. The present system was finally standardized only during Unicode deliberations. Indeed, Hindi unicode standards were finalised based on inputs from scholars hailing from Fiji and other countries. It is only when Unicode became the dominant standard that a number of changes were sought by the Indian government. At the informal level (as between friends, colleagues and co-workers, and in entertainment, films, etc.), the use of Hindi has been growing, even among non-native speakers. Hindi is often used if the speakers in question hail from different linguistic provinces, especially if they belong to a social stratum that has not accessed a very good English education, and often even otherwise. Hindi movies have been playing a substantial role in popularizing the language all over the country. Popular Hindi TV serials do the same today. Seeing the popularity of Hindi, BBC World Service started News in Hindi in 1940. History
Hindi evolved from Sanskrit, by way of the Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit languages and Apabhramsha of the Middle Ages. There is no consensus for a specific time where the modern north Indian languages such as Hindi emerged, but c. 1000 AD is commonly accepted.[9] In the span of nearly a thousand years of Muslim influence, such as when Muslim rulers controlled much of northern India during the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire, many Persian and Arabic words were borrowed into Hindi. All Arabic words were loaned into Hindi via Persian, and hence do not preserve the original phonology of Arabic (Tiwari [1955] 2004). Hindi is often contrasted with Urdu, another standardised form of Hindustani that is the official language of Pakistan and also an official language in some parts of India. The primary differences between the two are that Standard Hindi is written in Devanagari and draws its vocabulary with words from (Indo-Aryan) Sanskrit, while Urdu is written in Nastaliq script, a variant of the (Semitic) Perso-Arabic script, and draws heavily on Persian and Arabic vocabulary. Standard HindiAfter independence, the Government of India worked on standardizing Hindi, instituting the following changes:
Vocabulary
Standard Hindi derives much of its formal and technical vocabulary from Sanskrit. Standard or shuddh ("pure") Hindi is used only in public addresses and radio or TV news, while the everyday spoken language in most areas is one of several varieties of Hindustani, whose vocabulary contains words drawn from Persian and Arabic. In addition, spoken Hindi includes words from English and other languages as well. Vernacular Urdu and Hindi are practically indistinguishable. However, the literary registers differ substantially; in highly formal situations, the languages are barely intelligible to speakers of the other. It bears mention that in centuries past both Sanskrit and Persian have been regarded as the languages of the elite, even by those of differing ethnic and religious backgrounds. There are three principal categories of words in Standard Hindi:
Similarly, Urdu treats its own vocabulary, borrowed directly from Persian and Arabic, as a separate category for morphological purposes. Hindi from which most of the Persian, Arabic and English words have been ousted and replaced by tatsam words is called Shuddha Hindi (pure Hindi). Chiefly, the proponents of the so-called Hindutva ("Hindu-ness") are vociferous supporters of Shuddha Hindi. Excessive use of tatsam words sometimes creates problems for most native speakers. Strictly speaking, the tatsam words are words of Sanskrit and not of Hindi—thus they have complicated consonantal clusters which are not linguistically valid in Hindi. The educated middle class population of India can pronounce these words with ease, but people of rural backgrounds have much difficulty in pronouncing them. Similarly, vocabulary borrowed from Persian and Arabic also brings in its own consonantal clusters and "foreign" sounds, which may again cause difficulty in speaking them. Sociolinguistics of HindiVariantsSociolinguists have traditionally given what they call as four major variants or styles (शैली) of Hindi, viz.,[10]
Additionally, Hindustani is generally coined for the neutral style that is in-between High Hindi and Urdu and used in common speech. Dialects ("Mother Tongues")Hindi in the broad sense (formerly referred to as "Hindustani"; now often referred to as "Hindi-Urdu") is a dialect continuum without clear boundaries. For example, both Nepali and Punjabi are sometimes considered to be Hindi (based on the high level of mutual intelligibility for Punjabi and Hindi especially), though they are more often considered to be separate languages. Hindi is often divided into Western Hindi and Eastern Hindi, and these are further divided. Following is a list of principal Hindi dialects; many linguists regard only the dialects under Western and Eastern Hindi as proper Hindi dialects, and the rest as separate languages or sub-languages. The following listing is taken from Tiwari ([1966] 2004); even he notes that the classification of the dialects under various branches and their classification as a dialect of Hindi or as an independent language depends upon the perception of the linguist. Hindi region of the Indian subcontinentThis region includes the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chandigarh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand. Some people, such as the Government of India (while taking census) regard all the languages spoken in these states to be "mother tongues" of Hindi (barring tribal languages). Tiwari ([1966] 2004) lists them under five groups:
Depending upon perceptions, people also include various other dialects under Hindi, such as Nimari, Baiswari, Vajjika, Angika, etc. Non-Hindi regions in the Indian subcontinent
Outside the Indian subcontinent
Hindi and UrduThe term Urdu arose in 1645. Until then, and even after 1645, the term Hindi or Hindvi was used in a general sense for the dialects of central and northern India. There are two fundamental distinctions between Standard Urdu and Standard Hindi that lead to their being recognised as distinct languages:
Colloquially and linguistically, the distinction between the Urdu and Hindi is nearly meaningless. This is true over much of the northern half of the Indian subcontinent, wherever neither learned vocabulary nor writing is used. Outside the Delhi dialect area, the term "Hindi" may be used in reference to the local dialect, which may be very different from both Hindi and Urdu. The word Hindi has many different uses; confusion of these is one of the primary causes of debate about the identity of Urdu. These uses include:
The rubric "Hindi" is often used as a catch-all for those idioms in the North Indian dialect continuum that are not recognized as languages separate from the language of the Delhi region. Panjabi, Bihari, and Chhatisgarhi, while sometimes recognised as being distinct languages, are often considered dialects of Hindi. Many other local idioms, such as the Bhili languages, which do not have a distinct identity defined by an established literary tradition, are almost always considered dialects of Hindi. In other words, the boundaries of "Hindi" have little to do with mutual intelligibility, and instead depend on social perceptions of what constitutes a language. The other use of the word "Hindi" is in reference to Standard Hindi, the Khari boli register of the Delhi dialect of Hindi (generally called Hindustani) with its direct loanwords from Sanskrit. Standard Urdu is also a standardized form of Hindustani. Such a state of affairs, with two standardized forms of what is essentially one language, is known as a diasystem. Urdu was earlier called Zabān-e-Urdū-e-Mu’allah (زبانِ اردوِ معلہ, ज़बान-ऐ उर्दू), lit., the "Exalted Language of the Camp". Earlier, terms Hindi and Urdu were used interchangeably even by Urdu poets like Mir and Mirza Ghalib of the early 19th century (rather, the terms Hindvi/Hindi was used more often). By 1850, Hindi and Urdu were no longer used for the same language. Other linguists such as Sir G. A. Grierson (1903) have also claimed that Urdu is simply a dialect or style of Western Hindi. Before the Partition of India, Delhi, Lucknow, Aligarh and Hyderabad used to be the four literary centers of Urdu — none of which lie in present Pakistan. The colloquial language spoken by the people of Delhi is indistinguishable by ear, whether it is called Hindi or Urdu by its speakers. The only important distinction at this level is in the script: if written in the Perso-Arabic script, the language is generally considered to be Urdu, and if written in devanagari it is generally considered to be Hindi. However, since independence the formal registers used in education and the media have become increasingly divergent in their vocabulary. Where there is no colloquial word for a concept, Standard Urdu uses Perso-Arabic vocabulary, while Standard Hindi uses Sanskrit vocabulary. This results in the official languages being heavily Sanskritized or Persianized, and nearly unintelligible to speakers educated in the other standard (as far as the formal vocabulary is concerned). These two standardized registers of Hindustani have become so entrenched as separate languages that many extreme-nationalists, both Hindu and Muslim, claim that Hindi and Urdu have always been separate languages. The tensions reached a peak in the Hindi-Urdu controversy in 1867 in the then United Provinces during the British Raj. However, there were and are unifying forces as well. For example, it is said that Indian Bollywood films are made in "Hindi", but the language used in most of them is the same as that of Urdu speakers in Pakistan. The dialogue is frequently developed in English and later translated to an intentionally neutral Hindustani which can be easily understood by speakers of most North Indian languages, both in India itself and in Pakistan. PhonologyThere are approximately 11 vowels and 35 consonants in Standard Hindī. They are shown below: VowelsThe vowels of Hindi with their word-initial devanagari symbol, diacritical mark with the consonant प (p), pronunciation (of the vowel alone and the vowel following /p/) in IPA, equivalent in IAST and (approximate) equivalents in British English are listed below:
Additional notes on vowels
The dropping of schwa at the end in Hindi (for Sanskrit loanwords) causes a big problem for foreigners (Westerners learning Hindi). The IAST a appended to the end of these words rather confuses the foreigners to pronounce it as /ɑː/ or /aː/—this makes the masculine Sanskrit/Hindi words sound feminine. Some examples are given below:
The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association also describes the near-close near-front unrounded vowel (/ɪ/) the near-close near-back rounded vowel (/ʊ/) as occurring in Hindi phonology. They respectively occur as free allophones of short /i/ and /u/. ConsonantsHindi has a large consonant system, with about 38 distinct consonant phonemes. An exact number cannot be given, since the regional varieties of Hindi differ in the details of their consonant repertoire. To what extent certain sounds that appear only in foreign words should be considered part of Standard Hindi is also a matter of debate. The traditional core of the consonant system, inherited from Sanskrit, consists of a matrix of 20 plosives, 5 nasals, and 8 sonorants and fricatives. The system is filled out by 5 sounds that originated in Persian, but are now considered Hindi sounds. The table below shows the phonology of the Hindi consonants. Note that all nasals, trills, flaps, approximants and lateral approximants in Hindi are regarded as voiced consonants, and that many linguists also call the aspirated voiced plosives as breathy voice or murmur stops.
The 25 stop consonants occur in five groups, with each group sharing the same position of articulation. These positions in their traditional order are: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
